Our researchers have worked with former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, children affected by HIV/AIDS in Rwanda, and refugee families in the United States in order to develop low-cost interventions that improve life outcomes.
The Research Program on Children and Adversity (RPCA) focuses on observational research to understand trajectories of risk and resilience in children facing multiple forms of adversity while also using these research outcomes to develop and test evidence-based interventions to promote child health, development and family functioning. The program team, including a network of talented local collaborators, has developed and evaluated several transdiagnostic interventions that are both feasible, effective and able to be integrated into a range of social protection, health and education programs in low and middle income countries. Using implementation science methods, the program also tests strategies for quality improvement and sustainment of integrated evidence-based interventions including collaborative team approaches to improve fidelity and quality of the interventions to support early childhood development, violence prevention, and family strengthening so that they can be effectively and sustainably delivered at scale in low-resource settings. For over 20 years, our team in the US and our institutional partners in Sierra Leone and Rwanda, have expanded the evidence base on interventions promoting ECD & improving quality of life in Sub-Saharan Africa and in the United States with resettled refugees.
How we design and evaluate mental health services:
We have built models that apply a sequence of mixed qualitative and quantitative methods as a way to address some of the measurement challenges faced by the field. This innovative mixed methods process has been applied in a range of diverse cultural settings, and expands the traditional psychopathological approach to one that also examines local protective processes linked to resilient outcomes.